PAUL KLEE
Münchenbuchsee (Swiss), 1879 – Muralto-Locarno (Swiss), 1940 

His parents were musicians and he received a solid musical education before going to live in Munich in 1898 in order to start training as an artist at the Kunstakademie. Until 1906, when he settled definitively in Munich, he combined his activity as a violinist in the Bern Symphony Orchestra with the beginnings of a career as a painter, concentrating on the production of etchings and drawings in ink, intended to illustrate periodicals and books and displaying a grotesque, satirical tone in which influences of Goya and Ensor have been noted. It was not until 1911, when he began the systematic cataloguing of his work, that he intensified his relationships with the more avant-garde groups in Munich. Louis Moilliet introduced him to August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky, members of Der Blaue Reiter, which he joined that year, and he exhibited with them at the Galerie Goltz in Munich in 1912. A visit to Robert Delaunay’s studio in Paris completed the circle of influences that he received during that period. However, it was as the result of a journey to Tunisia in 1914 that he modified the terms of his visual language, relegating drawing to a secondary position and giving prime importance to colour, which he understands as being completely autonomous and independent of any external reference. When he returned, he became a founding member of the Neue Sezession in Munich.
During the First World War he was mobilised because of his German nationality, and he remained attached to the rearguard of the army until the end of the conflict. This enabled him to continue with his painting, which seems to have served as a means of escape in those years. After the war he presented a major retrospective at the Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich. After being rejected by the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart, he accepted an invitation from Walter Gropius to join the Bauhaus in 1920. He remained there for ten years, teaching painting and the theory of form. His work during this period turned to a basically geometrical world, inhabited by a very limited number of forms. He exhibited in the United States for the first time in 1924, a year before his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail. He taught at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, and his expulsion after the rise of Nazi party was the first of a long sequence of injustices that compelled him to flee to Switzerland, culminating with the inclusion of his work in the exhibition of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937.